While changes in collegiate athletic finances are accelerating like a champion sprinter, the federal agency overseeing an element of that race is dragging its feet.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) oversees Title IX, a section of federal law that prohibits gender discrimination in education programs receiving federal funding.
But in college athletics, Uncle Sam seems to have pulled a hamstring with his sluggish, under-resourced enforcement of the law, even as its significant achievements were widely celebrated during its 50th anniversary in 2022. That’s the picture painted by a critical government watchdog report.
A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit reviewed 26 college Title IX compliance agreements to improve gender equity. Although Title IX deals with education generally, the GAO audit focused on the OCR’s shortcomings in its oversight of gender equity in college athletics.
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It took the OCR at least a year to respond in 10 of those cases. In five others, there was no communication from the OCR for five years or more. Advocates blame too few employees for the workload.
“Such delays can prevent colleges from addressing compliance concerns,” the GAO said, and hinder attempts to “promptly address potential compliance issues.” Auditors reported:
● Years of OCR delay after a complaint that a women’s softball team had lower-quality facilities and fewer coaches than the men’s baseball team. The agency took almost seven years to approve a school’s equity plan, “causing a significant delay in the college’s ability to address any compliance concerns.”
● Hesitation by a college to upgrade women’s athletic facilities that were poorer than those for men by building a women’s locker room, because administrators didn’t hear from the OCR about compliance issues. At the time of the GAO’s review, “more than 2 years later, OCR had not provided any feedback to the college.”
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● A long pause for a college that needed the OCR’s authorization to add a new sport for women, which would provide them increased athletic opportunities. “The college waited for feedback from OCR before taking steps to add the sport, leading to a 10-month delay in recruiting a new coach.”
Education officials agreed with a GAO recommendation to establish timelines for responding to colleges. “OCR officials told us that resource constraints can cause delays in communicating with colleges,” the GAO reported.
A department spokesman did not respond directly to a Washington Post question about the long lag times in responding to colleges. “The Department remains committed,” said his email, to “fulfilling its mandate from Congress to protect every student from discrimination.”
But funding too low for the job can hamper, and even be counterproductive to, the mandate for equity.
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The agency “has been woefully underfunded for many years, especially when comparing the number of staff to the number of complaints,” 91 coalition organizations with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights wrote to President Biden in February. They urged him to double the OCR’s funding.
“Although OCR received more than six times as many complaints in 2022 as the office received in 1981, the number of staff was cut in half over that same time period,” the letter said. “OCR must urgently be provided the necessary resources to meet the moment.”
Far from a doubling, Biden’s 2025 fiscal budget sought $162 million for the OCR, a $22 million increase over the previous year.
The current explosion of interest in women’s basketball, set off by Caitlin Clark’s history-making, attention-demanding play, is one example of how the law is involved in not only the transformation of collegiate athletics but ultimately professional sports too.
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“There’s no way to separate Title IX” from today’s soaring popularity of women’s basketball, said Shiwali Patel, the National Women’s Law Center’s director of safe and inclusive schools.
The availability of the athletic opportunities and resources that Title IX envisions affects participation. That’s reflected in the GAO’s data. While women are 56 percent of all undergraduate students, women are just 42 percent of student-athletes. Those figures are reversed for men, who are 44 percent of all students and 58 percent of student-athletes.
Additionally, gender and racial disparities remain, 52 years after the law’s enactment. “Athletic opportunities for female athletes of color have grown at double the rate of those for white female athletes” since enactment of Title IX, according to a 2011 Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF) document, the latest available. Female athletes of color were more than one-quarter of female students but received less than one-fifth of “female athletic opportunities.” The report did not break down athletes of color by race and ethnicity.
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Inequities in men’s and women’s opportunities and facilities were shamefully displayed in 2021 when Sedona Prince, then a University of Oregon basketball player, posted a video showing a large, fully equipped March Madness fitness facility for men — and one rack of dumbbells for women. An NCAA official apologized. The association did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
The GAO report comes as new money-generating opportunities for college athletes are quickly increasing their earning potential. New rules allowing college athletes to be paid directly for use of their name, likeness and image, commonly called NIL, intensify the importance of efficient, robust Title IX enforcement.
Last week, the NCAA approved direct pay to athletes from their schools, defeating the soon-to-be quaint notion that collegiate athletes are amateurs. Since 2021, college athletes have been permitted to personally profit, by advertising products, for example, from NIL programs generally run by donor-funded collectives.
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If women don’t have equitable athletic opportunities in college, they can’t have equitable opportunities to profit from their athletic abilities. This situation is compounded, as shown in the WSF report, for Black and Hispanic athletes.
For Meghan Kissell, an American Association of University Women senior director, Title IX “is a promise, and it’s a promise that we’re always working toward to achieve. I think that what the [GAO] report is showing is that we’re not there yet.”
It also shows that the resource-starved OCR is unable to do enough to make the promise real.
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